July
08, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- After six solid months of co-ordinated
allegation from the mainstream media allied to
the leadership of state security institutions,
not one single scrap of solid evidence for
Trump/Russia election hacking has emerged.

I do
not support Donald Trump. I do support truth.
There is much about Trump that I dislike
intensely. Neither do I support the neo-liberal
political establishment in the USA. The latter’s
control of the mainstream media, and cunning
manipulation of identity politics, seeks to
portray the neo-liberal establishment as the
heroes of decent values against Trump. Sadly,
the idea that the neo-liberal establishment
embodies decent values is completely untrue.

Truth
disappeared so long ago in this witch-hunt that
it is no longer even possible to define what the
accusation is. Belief in “Russian hacking” of
the US election has been elevated to a generic
accusation of undefined wrongdoing, a vague
malaise we are told is floating poisonously in
the ether, but we are not allowed to analyse.
What did the Russians actually do?

The
original, base accusation is that it was the
Russians who hacked the DNC and Podesta emails
and passed them to Wikileaks. (I can assure you
that is untrue).

The
authenticity of those emails is not in question.
What they revealed of cheating by the Democratic
establishment in biasing the primaries against
Bernie Sanders, led to the forced resignation of
Debbie Wasserman Shultz as chair of the
Democratic National Committee. They also led to
the resignation from CNN of Donna Brazile, who
had passed debate questions in advance to
Clinton. Those are facts. They actually
happened. Let us hold on to those facts, as we
surf through lies. There was other nasty Clinton
Foundation and cash for access stuff in the
emails, but we do not even need to go there for
the purpose of this argument.

The
original “Russian hacking” allegation was that
it was the Russians who nefariously obtained
these damning emails and passed them to
Wikileaks. The “evidence” for this was twofold.
A report from private cyber security firm
Crowdstrike claimed that metadata showed that
the hackers had left behind clues, including the
name of the founder of the Soviet security
services. The second piece of evidence was that
a blogger named Guccifer2 and a website called
DNC Leaks appeared to have access to some of the
material around the same time that Wikileaks
did, and that Guccifer2 could be Russian.

That is
it. To this day, that is the sum total of actual
“evidence” of Russian hacking. I won’t say hang
on to it as a fact, because it contains no
relevant fact. But at least it is some form of
definable allegation of something happening,
rather than “Russian hacking” being a simple
article of faith like the Holy Trinity.

But there are a number of problems that prevent
this being fact at all. Nobody has ever been
able to refute the
evidence of Bill Binney,
former Technical Director of the NSA who
designed its current surveillance systems. Bill
has stated that the capability of the NSA is
such, that if the DNC computers had been hacked,
the NSA would be able to trace the actual
packets of that information as those emails
travelled over the internet, and give a precise
time, to the second, for the hack. The NSA
simply do not have the event – because there
wasn’t one. I know Bill personally and am quite
certain of his integrity.

As we
have been repeatedly told, “17 intelligence
agencies” sign up to the “Russian hacking”, yet
all these king’s horses and all these king’s men
have been unable to produce any evidence
whatsoever of the purported “hack”. Largely
because they are not in fact trying. Here is
another actual fact I wish you to hang on to:
The Democrats have refused the intelligence
agencies access to their servers to discover
what actually happened. I am going to say that
again.

The
Democrats have refused the intelligence agencies
access to their servers to discover what
actually happened.

The
heads of the intelligence community have said
that they regard the report from Crowdstrike –
the Clinton aligned private cyber security firm
– as adequate. Despite the fact that the
Crowdstrike report plainly proves nothing
whatsoever and is based entirely on an initial
presumption there must have been a hack, as
opposed to an internal download.

Not actually examining the obvious evidence has
been a key tool in keeping the “Russian hacking”
meme going. On 24 May the Guardian
reported triumphantly,
following the Washington Post, that

“Fox News falsely alleged federal
authorities had found thousands of emails
between Rich and Wikileaks, when in fact law
enforcement officials disputed that Rich’s
laptop had even been in possession of, or
examined by, the FBI.”

It
evidently did not occur to the Guardian as
troubling, that those pretending to be
investigating the murder of Seth Rich have not
looked at his laptop.

There
is a very plain pattern here of agencies
promoting the notion of a fake “Russian crime”,
while failing to take the most basic and obvious
initial steps if they were really investigating
its existence. I might add to that, there has
been no contact with me at all by those
supposedly investigating. I could tell them
these were leaks not hacks. Wikileaks. The clue
is in the name.

So
those “17 agencies” are not really investigating
but are prepared to endorse weird Crowdstrike
claims, like the idea that Russia’s security
services are so amateur as to leave fingerprints
with the name of their founder. If the Russians
fed the material to Wikileaks, why would they
also set up a vainglorious persona like
Guccifer2 who leaves obvious Russia pointing
clues all over the place?

Of course we need to add from the Wikileaks
“Vault 7” leak release, information that the CIA
specifically deploys technology that leaves
behind fake
fingerprints of
a Russian computer hacking operation.

Crowdstrike have a general anti-Russian
attitude. They published a report seeking to
allege that the same Russian entities which “had
hacked” the DNC were involved in targeting for
Russian artillery in the Ukraine. This has been
utterly discredited.

Some of the more crazed “Russiagate” allegations
have been quietly dropped. The mainstream media
are hoping we will all forget their breathless
endorsement of the reports of the charlatan
Christopher Steele, a former middle ranking MI6
man with very limited contacts that he milked to
sell
lurid gossip to
wealthy and gullible corporations. I confess I
rather admire his chutzpah.

Given
there is no hacking in the Russian hacking
story, the charges have moved wider into a vague
miasma of McCarthyite anti-Russian hysteria.
Does anyone connected to Trump know any
Russians? Do they have business links with
Russian finance?

Of
course they do. Trump is part of the worldwide
oligarch class whose financial interests are
woven into a vast worldwide network that
enslaves pretty well the rest of us. As are the
Clintons and the owners of the mainstream media
who are stoking up the anti-Russian hysteria. It
is all good for their armaments industry
interests, in both Washington and Moscow.

Trump’s
judgement is appalling. His sackings or
inappropriate directions to people over this
subject may damage him.

The old
Watergate related wisdom is that it is not the
crime that gets you, it is the cover-up. But
there is a fundamental difference here. At the
centre of Watergate there was an actual
burglary. At the centre of Russian hacking there
is a void, a hollow, and emptiness, an abyss, a
yawning chasm. There is nothing there.

Those
who believe that opposition to Trump justifies
whipping up anti-Russian hysteria on a massive
scale, on the basis of lies, are wrong. I remain
positive that the movement Bernie Sanders
started will bring a new dawn to America in the
next few years. That depends on political
campaigning by people on the ground and on
social media. Leveraging falsehoods and cold war
hysteria through mainstream media in an effort
to somehow get Clinton back to power is not a
viable alternative. It is a fantasy and even
were it practical, I would not want it to
succeed.

Craig Murray is an
author, broadcaster and human rights activist.
He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from
August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the
University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/

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